Admission requirements

Documentation of passed course must be sent to Section for Research Services, Faculty of Health Sciences. Students who have taken HEL-8014 or HEL-6320 at the University of Tromsø do not have to send in any documentation.

To take PhD courses you need at a minimum a master¿s degree or equivalent, or admission to a Medical Student Research Program.

Applicants, who are affiliated with the national network "Norwegian Research School in Medical Imagining" (MedIm), will be prioritized for admission if the number of applicants exceeds the course capacity of 10 students.

Course contents

The course will offer theoretical and practical training in state of the art techniques common in small animal molecular imaging. The teaching will be given as lectures, demonstrations, and practical sessions. The topics discussed will include animal welfare and injection methods, radiation protection, basic radiochemistry and radiopharmacy, multicellular tumour spheroid (MTS), frozen section autoradiography, biodistribution, preclinical PET/SPECT/CT, image analysis and aspects of translational research.Link to the preclinical PET/SPECT/CT facility at the Faculty of Health Science.

Objective of the course

At the end of the course the student will be able to:

Describe the theoretical foundation of preclinical molecular imaging as a modern research tool.

Describe and discuss advantages and limitations with modern techniques for in vivo, ex vivo and in vitro preclinical molecular imaging, including multicellular tumour spheroid (MTS), frozen section autoradiography biodistribition and PET/SPECT/CT.

Have a basic understanding for radiochemistry, radiopharmacy, biodistribution of tracers and the factors affecting the choice of tracer for a specific imaging task.

Plan, prepare and perform a basic MTS experiment, including preparation of cell cultures to be used for MTS's, preparation of the MTS's, collecting data and analyzing the results.

Plan, prepare and perform a standard in vitro frozen section autoradiography experiment, including preparation and cryosectioning of frozen tissue, incubating it with a radioactive PET or SPECT tracer, exposing and scanning the image plate and analyzing the resulting images.

Plan, prepare and perform a standard ex vivo biodistribution experiment, including sacrificing the animal after PET-tracer administration, dissection and removing the organs of interest, measuring the radioactivity in each organ using wellcounter, analyze, correlate and compare the result with in vivo imaging.

Plan, prepare and perform a standard in vivo PET/SPECT/CT experiment, including intravenous administration of a PET or SPECT tracer, preparing a static or dynamic scan protocol, performing the scan, reconstructing the images, analyzing and extracting useful information from the static or dynamic images, for example specific uptake values (SUV) and time activity curves.

Language of instruction

English

Teaching methods

Lectures, demonstrations and practical hands-on exercises.

Assessment

Work requirements:

Attendance at the course, including lectures, demonstrations and laboratory exercises.

Passed reports on all of the laboratory exercises.

Examination and assessment:Home examination, 10 pages, graded pass or fail. The examination can be answered in any Scandinavian language or English.

Continuation exam:There will be the option of one supplementary examination if a fail grade is achieved at the first attempt. Application deadline for continuation exam is January 15th.